Years ago my department lost a secretary and was forced to replace her with another one from elsewhere in the company. Her boss had just retired and she needed a job and we needed a secretary so she was foisted on us. She was a very bad fit for our department and was of the mindset, "I'm an old dog, so don't try to teach me any new tricks!" We didn't like her, she didn't like us, she was a bad fit, and she did a lousy job. Finally, the company agreed to transfer her to yet another department. The first memo she typed was to some big outside contact and was cc'd to department heads including ours. It obviously passed muster with the Word spell-check, so Old Dog evidently saw no reason to proofread it herself. The memo should have read: "We received the data and we are now studying it." Instead, she had typed: "We received the data and we are not studying it." Old Dog was out, and we were off the hook!

Back in the days of typewriters (yeah, I'm old), we used to have to send letters to someone named Scott and about 75% of the time I typed Scoot. Used to make me laugh out loud (and then have to correct it!)

And being a "professional" grammartician whose favorite hobby is noticing typos (they just jump out at me when I'm not even looking for one), one popped out in one of the real state listings in our local city paper as I was folding it. So I just had to read all the ads. 11 typos in 9 ads, and that was not counting the spacing between words and sentences. I saw "nature trees" and couldn't figure out what that was until the next ad said "mature trees". I wonder how much they would pay me to edit their stuff. ha.

(And yeah, I don't proofread my postings to death, so there might be typos, but I'm not exactly trying to get someone's business here.)

Public turned into pubic will always be -worthy! I've seen it more than once!

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Oh Lord, that happened to me once. I'm a graphic designer & did a very high profile annual report for a university. They provided the copy & i just had to put it into the layout. Somewhere it mentioned "our many public services..." yeah, missing the L. Most people saw the humor, but one did not, & made us print a separate sheet pointing out the error & apologizing for it, sent to everyone who had gotten the report (tens of thousands). Personally i figure people see something like that & realize it's obviously an honest mistake.

I think the autocorrect features on smartphones are responsible for many of the incoherent posts on the Internet. I used to have to fight with my IPhone whenever I signed my name "Alice". It kept changing it to "alive". I can scarily type a word without it offering me a substitute. Sometimes it let's it go the first time I reject the substitution, but other times it gets very adamant. True I could turn this feature off, but for some perverse reason I never do.

ETA: I know I didn't type scarily in the third sentence! It was supposed to be scarcely. My phone must have been confused by Halloween.

Many years ago a secreatary of the department where I worked used spellcheck function on a services proposal to our customers and replaced "advisory services" with "adversary services"... we never got that contract...

After the big storm here last June, my sister texted me that "some shutters fell off around here" . . . only she accidentally typed an "i" instead of a "u" in "shutters." I've still got that text saved on my phone.

The other day, before Sandy, I texted her and asked, "Are you getting ready for the big storm?" only it came out "bug storm."

The SHELL station up the road seems to always have that "S" burned out and it makes for a hysterical drive along the boulevard at night to see that people are actually in line and eager to go to HELL!!!

Back in the days of typewriters (yeah, I'm old), we used to have to send letters to someone named Scott and about 75% of the time I typed Scoot. Used to make me laugh out loud (and then have to correct it!)

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I was in journalism school at the time and we were taught not to make even one mistake in our cover letters for job applications. White out was way too messy to use if you made mistake, so the letter would have to be redone if there were an error. I remember piles of paper building up on the floor.

2 bloopers I remember from our synagogue bulletin/calendar from many years ago:

There was a monthly column about the activities of our Young Couples Group in the synagogue - it was mistakenly labeled Young Catholics Group! The bulletin went out to the congregation printed as such.

Every year the Men's Club of the synagogue would print out a calendar, including congregants' birthdays. Well, the Hazzan's (cantor's) birthday was noted in one of the months, but instead of it saying "Hazzan" it said Hazzar, which means pig in the sense of glutton (whether you're thinking in Hebrew or Yiddish). I saw the printed copy of the calendar before it was mailed out to the congregation. As a result, the calendar was delayed for about a month, until this misprint could be corrected!